1. Field
The present invention relates to connection arrangements between a removable car seat and a vehicle, such as a car. For purposes herein, the term “car seat” is to be understood broadly to include child safety seats.
2. State of the Art
Every year, thousands of young children are killed or injured in crashes, mainly because 3 out of every 4 children in child safety seats are not properly secured, or even worse, not restrained at all. To address the problem of improper car seat installation, various industry-wide standards have been adopted. However, such standards introduce their own difficulties for installing car seats in vehicles, as described below.
ISOFIX is the international standard for attachment points for child safety seats in passenger cars. The system has other regional names including LATCH (“Lower Anchors and Tethers for Children”) in the United States and LUAS (“Lower Universal Anchorage System”) or Canfix in Canada. It has also been called the “Universal Child Safety Seat System” or UCSSS.
ISOFIX is described in International Organisation for Standardisation standard ISO 13216, which specifies the anchoring system for Group 1 child safety seats. It defines standard attachment points to be manufactured into cars, enabling compliant child safety seats to be safely secured. ISOFIX is an alternative to securing the seat with seat belts. Seats are secured with a single attachment at the top (top tether) and two attachments at the base of each side of the seat. The full set of anchor points for this system were required in new cars in the United States starting in September 2002.
In the European Union (EU) the car seat connection system is known as ISOFIX and covers both Group 0/0+ and Group 1 child safety seats. The mechanism for attaching the seat to the lower anchors is quite different from that in the United States. In the EU two “alligator-like” clips connect the seat to the lower anchors rather than the open clip style connectors commonly used in the United States. However, some car seat manufactures are beginning to offer true ISOFIX type attachments in the U.S. In the EU standard, there are also various installation categories: “universal”, “vehicle-specific” and “semi-universal”. The main differences are that “Universal” represents use of a top tether strap with the ISOFIX anchorage, “vehicle-specific” represents the usage of the ISOFIX anchorage without the top tether in specified vehicles only, while “Semi-Universal” represents usage of the ISOFIX anchorage together with a “foot-prop”.
ISOFIX is designed to secure a maximum combined weight (weight of both seat and child) of 65 lbs (29.54 kgs). The center-to-center distance between the anchors of ISOFIX (and also LATCH) systems is 11 inches (280 mm).
For a typical rear facing car seat that includes a base that is separate from the car seat, when the car seat base is uninstalled from the vehicle, the base and associated connection straps and quick-connect connectors remain connected to the base, not to the vehicle. Therefore, upon reinstallation of the base to the vehicle, a user must locate the car seat anchors, which are often obscured in a difficult-to-access location between the vehicle seat bottom and the backrest. Thus, connecting, removing, and reconnecting the base to the vehicle, even using quick-connect connectors and car seat anchors, can be time consuming and difficult to perform for some users.